What’s Normal?

This kind of thing really annoys me. Not the whole strip – just the last panel. To suggest that there’s such a thing as “normal-sized” girls is ridiculous. Girls come in all sizes, and the real problem is that shops only carry clothes for “normal-sized” girls.

Now I know there is another problem – the problem that we have obviously underweight celebrities pushing an unhealthy idea of the perfect body on poor women everywhere. I’m not saying that’s right, and I appreciate when people try to tell women what a healthy body really is. What I object to is suggestions that if you’re smaller than a certain size, you’re not healthy, and that there is a “normal” size for women at all.

Remember there are smaller healthy women, too. My wife is a healthy size 6 (Australian size 6, that is). It’s really hard for her to find anything her size. Most of the stuff in the shops is size 10 or size 12. If you’re really lucky, you might find a small size 8 that fits. She’s always seeing something she likes and then finding out that they don’t have anything in her size. And my wife isn’t the smallest woman I know. I know some healthy size 4s as well.

I know it’s bad for larger women, too. But while there are some shops that specialise in larger sizes (for example, there’s a chain called MySize that only sells sizes 16 to 24), there are no such aids for smaller women.

But the whole problem is that “normal” girls are size 10 or size 12 (i.e. the average size across the population is somewhere in that range), and shops only cater for “normal” girls. If you’re outside that (very narrow) range, you’re out of luck.